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I had the wonderful opportunity to interview an up and coming jazz-influenced video game cover band that goes by the name MissingNo. They're from Vancouver and most of them are still in the Jazz Studies program at one of the local universities. I just figured I'd share the interview I had with them in case anyone is interested in jazz or arranging music or video game cover bands in general. These guys have a really great sound and they put a unique spin on all of their arrangements, especially when the internet is drowning in a never ending stream of techno and metal versions of Wily's Stage.

Anyway, I don't usually like to use this blog to plug other stuff (including my own podcast), but for these guys I need to make an exception. They deserve to be heard and I hope nothing but the best for them. So give my interview a listen and then check out their full EP that just came out last night at www.missingnoband.com And if you feel so inclined check out 8-bits of Destiny on facebook or twitter or... tumblr or wherever else. It's a video game art show that I help run and I host the companion podcast.

I'm the sort of person who is willing to give certain publishers the benefit of the doubt. Capcom, Sega, Nintendo, etc. have all done things to disappoint at some time or another, but it's very rare that I will outright state that a company has made a grevious, heinous error that I consider a personal affront to my sensibilities. I know many who have had this experience in the past few years with Square but I've managed to stand by a great number of their decisions with a diplomatic eye and a willingness to embrace their choices. Theatrhythm (the 3DS version, mind you), Dissidia 012 and Final Fantasy Dimensions (in order of most to least beloved by the majority) are all examples of games that I feel I got a lot of value out of. All The Bravest is not one of these. Though I suppose it's not a particularly fair comparison for you see:

All The Bravest is not a game.

Announced sometime this morning I guess(?), FF:ATB (which has tarnished what was once an acronym that represented innovation and ingenuity) is a Final Fantasy-themed nickel and diming machine for iOS that manages to take 25 years of history and joy and excitement and wonder and wrap it all up in a blackjack, beat you in the scrotum with it until your vision fades, and then leave you to wake on the street corner with an empty wallet and your childhood dreams retroactively filled with images of executives drinking martinis while lounging in the corporate infinity pool being waited on by your mother as they pat her bum and slip a note into her g-string in whatever denomination of yen is typically slipped into g-strings. I don't know, I'm not a rich douche.

There should have been a great deal of wonderful stuff going on in this app. Square has shown us that they can do nostalgia right. Dissidia was an exciting title with incredible arrangements of old songs, easter eggs and inside jokes as far as the eye can see, and an incredibly vast amount of interesting content for fans of the series. Theatrhythm was a beautiful celebration of a quarter century of some of the most influential music in the medium and a damn good rhythm game to boot. Sure, both of these games had some DLC attached to them that, in the case of Dissidia, really should have just been included in the game. But there was meat there. There was content. There was substance that only reinforced a love for Final Fantasy that was already there. It reinvigorated those feelings of wonder that came from first entering Cornelia, or watching Maria and Draco, or stepping out onto the world map for the first time.

Just to get it out the way, ATB plays out as a rapid button pushing game. Your screen fills up with dozens of your 'party members' (all nameless, arbitrarily-chosen members of whatever job classes you've unlocked so far) and your job is to tap them or swipre your finger over them once their Active Time Battle (GETTIT?!) gauge has filled. They will then automatically attack whatever is on the other side of the screen. There is no strategy involved. Your party is chosen at random. There is no choice of attacks. There is no option to select which monster to attack. It is dumb and stupid and I hate it. Now you know how this 'game' 'plays'. Let's move on.

FF:ATB is a $3.99 app. That's up there in the grand scheme of iOS games, which typically run from 99 cents to 3 bucks, but on the lower end of the spectrum for Square published titles which can reach FF:Dimensions heights of $30~ or Theatrhythm iOS which requires a mortgage and a child as collateral.

So here we have our $3.99 game. It's a mobile game from Square so we can assume that there will be some little add-ons and what have you. That's fine. That's the age we live in. There is bound to be PREMIUM CONTENT. What this amounts to is:

3 Levels for $3.99 apiece

35 Characters for 99 cents apiece (CHOSEN AT RANDOM)

Those are all well and good, yeah? I mean, I have my issue with this CHOSEN AT RANDOM business but I'll get to that another time because what awaits is the most sacreligious of 'gameplay' choices:

IF YOU DIE, THAT IS IF ALL YOUR PARTY MEMBERS ARE INCAPACITATED, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO WAIT 3 REAL TIME MINUTES PER CHARACTER TO RECOVER AND BE ABLE TO FIGHT AGAIN, BUUUUUUT YOU MAY USE THE POWER OF THE GOLD HOURGLASS TO BRING BACK ALL YOUR PARTY MEMBERS WITHOUT WAIT TIME.

Guess.

JUST GUESS.

Guess what is required of you to come into possession of a Gold Hourglass?

THAT'S RIGHT! HUMAN MONEY! REAL LIFE DOLLARS! CORPOREAL BUCKS!

3 of these puppies will cost you 99 cents, 8 will set you back $1.99 and 20 will run you a healthy $2.99.

Let's just recap: If I want to keep playing a video game that I have ALREADY PAYED for, I am required to fork over more money. I understand this sort of business model for a Free To Play, Freemium style game, but this is a $3.99 game with the most rudimentary of gameplay, re-used assets, and the most basic of structure.

This is an affront to everything that Final Fantasy stands for. When I purchase a game or an app or DLC or ANYTHING, I pay for content. I will ALWAYS be willing to pay for content. Dimensions is an example of a game that many people derided for it's high price point but when it came down to it, it was content that I felt comfortable paying for and I felt good about my purchase.

What's happening with titles like ATB is not providing content, but providing a service. It's turning what was once a good, a crafted experience, someone's work, into a service designed to milk people's credit cards and make them think they're getting a game out of it. There is no substance here. There is no game. There is a button-pushing simulator wrapped in the guise of nostalgia and familiarity. It's made all the more damning by using sprites and music from what was considered a golden age of innovation and exploration of our medium and bastardizing it to no end.

Please, I implore you, if you do decide to purchase All The Bravest do so with the utmost caution. If you enjoy games like Crystal Defenders then perhaps you'll find something of merit in there but it won't have the depth or the love or the passion or the heart of anything resembling a video game. Especially not a Final Fantasy.

And please, if you have any thoughts on the matter, comment below. Someone tell me that I'm wrong. I would love to be wrong! I would love to know that there is come sort of kernel of soul buried in this empty husk of a game.

Let me preface this blog entry by stating that I thoroughly enjoyed FFIV: The After Years. It was a sloppy, ham-fisted, ridiculous, wonderful game and I'm glad it exists.

Final Fantasy Dimensions Is A Thing That Happened And Also Isn't a Godless Abomination

I was inspired to write about this topic for one very important reason: No one else on the planet has been inspired to write about this topic.

For those not in the know, FF Dimensions (or FF Legends as it's known in Japan [not to be confused with The FF Legend for Game Boy {which was actually the first game in the SaGa series in Japan (also fuck this)}]) began it's release cycle in Japan in 2010 for mobile platforms and was developed by Matrix Software; the same Matrix Software that benevolently showered upon us the excellent FFIII and IV DS remakes in the latter half of the last decade. Dimensions has recently been 'updated' and is now available on iOS in both Japan and for the first time, North America.

And no one cares.

Worse than that even! People are actively against the very idea of this brand-new, full-length, spiritual successor to the golden age of RPGs. The most common headlines regarding Dimensions are those that decry it's price of $28.99 solely for the fact that it's platform has set a standard of $0.99 pick-up and play casual games. I suppose it's my fault, really. I just wasn't aware that I had slipped into a hellish dimension where it's unreasonable to pay thirty bucks for a NEW FINAL FANTASY GAME. For all the 'Let's go back to the good old days of SquareSOFT' and 'New Final Fantasy games have no soul! They need to give us a REAL FF!' that gets thrown around so casually these days, I find it astounding that when we DO receive a classic throwback game it garners little to no fanfare, is blasted by the gaming media for 'shamelessly charging premium prices' and a week after it's release I can't find a professional review of it to save my life.

One thing I really want to try to clear up is the pricing. Square kind of shot themselves in the foot with the way they've laid out the in-app shop. It lists Chapter 1 as $2.99. A reasonable price, no? Beyond that, however, we see Chapters 2,3 and 4 listed as $9.99. The problem lies in the fact that Chapters 2,3 and 4 contain several episodes each and are substantially longer than Chapter 1 but there's little indication of this within the store. One must either assume that a higher price point means more content or, which is unfortunately the more natural response and somewhat justified, that Square is trying to sleight them by sucking them into the game at a lower price and then charging more for subsequent installments. Why they didn't stick with the price points and chapter selection system of After Years, I'm not sure, but this oddly skewed pricing has been a major point of contention for the press and consumers alike and it seems like few are interested in looking past it.

But if you are capable of getting past these unfortunate hurdles there lies within a game so familiar, so nostalgic, yet so unlike any other! Which is both a blessing and a curse in this case.

Dimensions' original release featured sprites that looked as though they were ripped straight from the mid-90s. Anyone but the most knowledgable of FF fans wouldn't be able to tell you that the characters and monsters from Dimensions weren't from an authentic SNES titles. Like FFV, FFD also gives us different sprites for each character in each new job class which, for me, was one of the most exciting parts of experimenting with jobs when I first adventured with Bartz and crew.

However, Dimensions' iOS release opts for some fancy new 'updated' graphics which means all the sprites have been redrawn for the retina display of iOS devices. All this really does is make the game look like it came from an alternate dimension where polygons were never discovered and video games only ever got more detailed sprites. This is alright I guess, but it makes the presentation feel somewhat anachronistic which really shouldn't be the case when going for a retro throwback game.But despite that little bit cognitive dissonance, the graphics really are quite nice. Enemy sprites in particular are well done. The only overall gripe is that the individual job sprites of each character don't have as much variety as those of FFV where each character's job sprite had a little bit of their own personal flair mixed in. These are mostly color swaps of either a male or female version of the class with a different head slapped on. Though again, for what it is, it looks very nice.

Now the battle system itself is an absolute joy. Combining jobs and abilities is just as fun as it was in FFV but Dimensions also adds an extra element in the Fusion system. When equipping a character with two compatible job abilities they will form an F-Ability that you can access at any time from their own tab on the battle screen. This functions much like the Band system from After Years but F-Abilities are more passive; they'll activate themselves when conditions are met. This means no more trying endless combinations of every skill with every other skill like in After Years.

This little addition is just enough to spice up what was already a proven system of character customization and promotes the use of multiple job trees instead of just making everyone a monk and plowing through with brute force.

So! Now you know a little bit more about Final Fantasy Dimensions and hopefully it's enough to make you consider at least getting the free prologue episode that's available. I'd go into more depth about characters and story and pacing and things like that, but I'm only a few hours in myself. That should stand as a testament though that with only a few hours under my belt I felt that this was a game that was deserving of a little more recognition. I'd like to do a follow-up once I have the whole game finished and I'm feeling extra saucy though. In the meantime I want you to go, spread the word that there is an excellent old school RPG waiting to be played and it's not as evil as some headlines make it out to be! It has a great deal of nuance and atmosphere that's only made more potent by it's 'primitive' presentation and this game deserves to be experienced and explored. Or you might hate it. That's fine too.

Just don't pay goddam $9.99 for the chiptune background music. That's a load of bollocks and someone needs to get their shit slapped.